Nearly every legendary innovation was initially mocked or misunderstood by the so-called “experts.” In truth, scrutiny and doubt are just part of the toll we pay to take the path less traveled. But knowing this doesn’t make it any easier.

This quote comes from the99percent, from an article discussing criticism, cynicism & sharpening your gut instinct. The article explore when one should embrace the critic’s opinion vs when to ignore it, and includes some worthy pointers into how to develop your gut feeling to this respect.

On criticism, cynicism & sharpening your gut instinct | The 99 percent

A recent interesting study, looking at the economics of spam-based advertising, highlights this journey — a snapshot of which can be seen in the image above.

Highlights from the study include:

• 95% of products are monetized using merchant services from a handful of banks
• The credit-card transactions were the “choke-point”
• Out of the 120 purchases, 76 were authorised, 56 settled and all but 7 were delivered

I include here the abstract for your consumption:

Abstract—Spam-based advertising is a business. While it has engendered both widespread antipathy and a multi-billion dollar anti-spam industry, it continues to exist because it fuels a profitable enterprise. We lack, however, a solid understanding of this enterprise’s full structure, and thus most anti-spam interventions focus on only one facet of the overall spam value chain (e.g., spam filtering, URL blacklisting, site takedown). In this paper we present a holistic analysis that quantifies the full set of resources employed to monetize spam email— including naming, hosting, payment and fulfilment—using extensive measurements of three months of diverse spam data, broad crawling of naming and hosting infrastructures, and over 100 purchases from spam-advertised sites. We relate these resources to the organisations who administer them and then use this data to characterise the relative prospects for defensive interventions at each link in the spam value chain. In particular, we provide the first strong evidence of payment bottlenecks in the spam value chain; 95% of spam-advertised pharmaceutical, replica and software products are monetized using merchant services from just a handful of banks.

You can read the full paper here [PDF] – Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain

Recently the daily mail published a remarkable interview of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. In the interview Mr. Gates discusses, rather candidly, many personal things — from his children teasing him, to his friendship with Facebook founder Mark Zukerberg, Bono and Oprah to his plans for chaining the world.

Here is a highlight of what you can expect:

Why not be the guy who cures cancer instead?

‘The motto of the foundation is that every life has equal value. There are more people dying of malaria than any specific cancer. When you die of malaria aged three it’s different from being in your seventies, when you might die of a heart attack or you might die of cancer. And the world is putting massive amounts into cancer, so my wealth would have had a meaningless impact on that.’

I implore you to read the interview in it’s entirely as it’s a rare glimpse into the psyche of a genius. However what I most enjoyed about whilst reading this piece is we get to see the human side of Bill, that is not always apparent.

You can read the full article here or if you are short on time then read the 10 details revealed by Bill Gates.

Be sure to watch in HD with the sound right up.

Image by kot.stephan

Until I go there, I can be envious of this gorgeous display. As an aside this video was shot in temperatures around -25 Celsius.

The Aurora from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.

Phuket Breathing // Thailand from artisland on Vimeo.

Discovered through Vagabondish.

Here are a collection of images in memory. (Click on the link to go to the original image; all images credited via link).

Suggested reading:

• Knut: A polar bear story

Just  a quick one, I can across this on the Dallas Observer. It’s the Japanese design of a Dr Pepper can, if ture then, Japanese culture just got even cooler.

Via The Dallas Observer Blog.

Photo credit: Shandi-Lee

I started the new year drinking a well brewed cup of tea, sure it may have had a tad more milk then I would’ve liked, and a little bit too much sweetener, but it was well brewed.

The advantages of drinking tea have been known of years, and have been documented for equally as long

However, despite all of this it can still be difficult to find a decent cup of tea. Which is why I was glad to see Slate.com informing the public at large on How to make a decent cup of tea.

And following a link shared in the comments led me to hacker’s guide to tea, which includes a very useful table containing water temperature and steeping times for various teas.

Check out the info and make yourself a decent cup of tea next time.

Check it out after the jump.

You can check out the full size graphic here.

[Juan Pablo Bravo via Gizmodo]